IPv6: 60 percent of some university traffic, but still not enabled everywhere.

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is meeting in Vancouver. As is tradition by now, the Tuesday lunch slot was used by the Internet Society (ISOC) for a panel discussion about an issue important to the future of the Internet. Today's topic: the state of IPv6 after the World IPv6 Launch two months ago, executed under the optimistic title "Life with a bigger Internet—World IPv6: Launched!"

The World IPv6 Launch on June 6 was an industry-wide effort to get websites to enable IPv6 permanently, to have participating Internet Service Providers turn on the new protocol for at least one percent of their users, and for home router vendors to enable IPv6 by default. All of this is needed because the current version 4 of the Internet Protocol is quickly running out of addresses.

Leslie Daigle, ISOC's chief Internet technology officer, stressed that World IPv6 Launch was not about turning off IPv4—that won't happen "anytime soon." Instead, websites added IPv6, making them reachable for both IPv4 and IPv6 users. "The important takeaways are that IPv6 is launched, and that this was a phenomenal collaborative industry effort." And: "it's not too late for access providers to sign up."

Mat Ford, technology program manager at ISOC, presented a variety of IPv6 measurements. The amount of IPv6 traffic per network (including both content networks and ISPs) varies enormously, with more than 17 percent at French ISP Free and a very surprising nearly 60 percent at Virginia Tech and Louisiana State University on the one hand, and a few tenths of a percent elsewhere, such as Time Warner Cable. And many networks haven't enabled IPv6 at all. All statistics saw a big jump in IPv6 deployment and/or traffic on June 6, and then typically also a steady increase after that. Currently, 25 percent of Alexa's global top 1000 websites have an IPv6 address in the DNS.

George Michaelson from APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry that hands out IP addresses in Asia and the Pacific, presented results from a creative way to measure IPv6 usage: they placed an ad. In order to get a decent number of clicks, the ad's flash code had to be shown to lots of users, which allowed Michaelson to observe many unique IP addresses. Interestingly, countries that are otherwise fairly similar may exhibit very different IPv6 adoption rates. For instance, they measured only 0.098 percent in Canada, but 1.3 percent in the United States. The explanation for this is that one or two big ISPs with a decent number of IPv6 users can easily inflate the number for an entire country.

John Brzozowski, chief architect at Comcast, talked about Comcast's IPv6 deployment. Currently, two percent of Comcast's users are on IPv6, and about one percent of its traffic is IPv6—until the Olympics, that is, which increased the number to six percent, thanks to YouTube's live streaming of the event. When a user has IPv6, as much as 40 percent of their traffic can be IPv6, mostly because of YouTube, Netflix, and the iTunes App Store.

Lee Howard, director of network technology for Time Warner Cable, explained that the World IPv6 Launch goal of one percent IPv6-enabled users was more ambitious than it seems. In Time Warner's network, about half of the cable modems and 30 percent of the Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) in the network support IPv6. About half of the users have an operating system that supports IPv6—nearly 50 percent are still on Windows XP. But 85 percent of customers have a home router between their cable modem and their computer(s), which typically doesn't support IPv6. So the total number of Time Warner users that can actually use IPv6 is only 0.5 x 0.3 x 0.5 x 0.15 = just over one percent.

Google's Lorenzo Colitti talked about remaining issues now that IPv6 has been rolled out in Google's network. There are networks with broken IPv6 setups which, rather than fixing the problem, simply filter IPv6 addresses in the DNS. Colitti: "Filtering of AAAA records is not a good idea because, among other things, it masks the problem. You can't tell when the problem is solved." In some cases, especially in Japan, two networks both have IPv6, but they don't interconnect directly or through a bigger ISP, so they can't reach each other over IPv6.

Colitti warned that IPv6 isn't in "self-sustaining mode" yet: if the additional cost of IPv6 is substantial, businesses may choose to launch a new service on just IPv4 first. But the good news is that IPv6 adoption grew by 150 percent over the last year. If that rate holds up, half the Internet will be on IPv6 in 2018, with the entire Internet caught up a year later. (Of course Asia has been out of IPv4 address for a year now, Europe will run out within two or three months, and North America within several years).

Erik Nygren, chief architect at Akamai, said that Akamai saw 19 million different IPv6 addresses at World IPv6 Launch, no less than 67 times the number seen at last year's World IPv6 Day. The traffic was an impressive factor 460 higher at 3.8 billion requests. The reason: more IPv6 users, and more content on IPv6. A total of 86 percent of Akamai's IPv6 requests came from just three networks: Verizon Wireless (which has a lot of IPv6-enabled Android devices on its LTE network), AT&T, and Comcast in the US, as well as RCS & RDS in Romania, Free in France, and KDDI in Japan. The geographic distribution of those requests is rather uneven at 71 percent from the US, 21 percent from Europe, 5.1 percent from Asia, and only 0.4 percent from the rest of the world. (See Akamai's World IPv6 Launch infographic [PDF]).

At the end of the panel session, Leslie Daigle asked the panel whether someone who only has IPv6 can be considered to be "on the Internet" at this point. No panel members were prepared to answer in the affirmative just yet, but she was encouraged to keep asking the question. The good news is that IPv6 is finally getting some traction. The bad news is it's not happening nearly fast enough to avoid an ugly transition.

Iljitsch van Beijnum
Iljitsch is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, where he contributes articles about network protocols as well as Apple topics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D work at the telematics department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain. Emaililjitsch.vanbeijnum@arstechnica.com//Twitter@iljitsch

39 Reader Comments

I did a presentation on IPv6 for a graduate level seminar I was taking. When I did the presentation, IPv6 was already being implemented in real world environments and it was expected to take off "real soon now".

I find it a little ironic that they're meeting in a city/country where no major ISPs seem to even be taking IPv6 seriously. The numbers in the article bear this out, and it's pretty pathetic. I've heard from a small local business ISP that only half their upstream providers are even capable of providing IPv6 transit, and it's taken nearly 6 months and it's still not lit up.

To the best of my knowledge, TekSavvy is the only end-user ISP in the country that's even mentioned IPv6 in public, and has a beta program for users to join. And they're small.

They need to make IPv6 addresses cheaper. Why should an ISP incur the $1,687.50 in 2012 and $2,250 in 2013 for even small allocations when there is little to no demand? Even if their equipment and software is ready, why spend the money? Why not divide the cost in the fee schedule https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html by 10? It used to cost $225 in 2008... but hardly any equipment was ready back then. Now a lot of the network stack is ready, so now is when the fee costs should be very low. Further, the cost of IPv4 blocks should be higher. Especially the larger blocks... triple or quadruple the cost of IPv4 blocks and divide the cost of IPv6 blocks by 10, and have it set that way for at least 4 years.

Basically, the cost of IPv6 blocks should be in the realm of why not... it's really cheap.

In the meantime, I've been using Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunneling with Juniper firewalls because my ISP's won't get IPv6 blocks yet.

But the good news is that IPv6 adoption grew by 150 percent over the last year. If that rate holds up, half the Internet will be on IPv6 in 2018 with the entire Internet a year later.

I think we can safely assume that curves taken from a fixed set will not reach 100%, ever.

When 99% do not have ipv6, the number approximately triples in one year. When 50% do not have ipv6, the number clearly cannot triple anymore, so you suggest it will just grow to 100% that year?

I haven't looked at the statistics of this, but my guess is that as the "supply" (ipv4 only hosts) shrinks, the growth rate will shrink rapidly. So at first, the growth may appear to follow an exponential curve, but as the "supply" starts to run out, the curve will flatten out towards the 100% asymptote, which sounds more like a logarithmic curve.

Even if you are right that it will hit 50% in 2018, I would suggest 2030 would be a better guess as to when it hits approximately 100% (WAG).

IPv6 is being taken very seriously here, but lack of vendor support with certain apps has delayed things a bit. I suspect other large companies are in similar situations. The upshot is that IPv6 support will likely see significant growth over the next year or so as vendors catch up.

My ISP doesn't have functionality for IPv6 tunnels and isn't scheduled at all to upgrade from IPv4 at all which I'm fine with until eventually support wanes for IPv4 and CenturyTel is forced to pluck their head from their ass.

I work for a large-ish hosting company. I'm pretty damn sure that we won't be officially supporting IPv6 until these motherfsckers can support it, since this is what the vast majority of our customers use.

I find it a little ironic that they're meeting in a city/country where no major ISPs seem to even be taking IPv6 seriously. The numbers in the article bear this out, and it's pretty pathetic. I've heard from a small local business ISP that only half their upstream providers are even capable of providing IPv6 transit, and it's taken nearly 6 months and it's still not lit up.

To the best of my knowledge, TekSavvy is the only end-user ISP in the country that's even mentioned IPv6 in public, and has a beta program for users to join. And they're small.

They need to make IPv6 addresses cheaper. Why should an ISP incur the $1,687.50 in 2012 and $2,250 in 2013 for even small allocations when there is little to no demand? Even if their equipment and software is ready, why spend the money? Why not divide the cost in the fee schedule https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html by 10? It used to cost $225 in 2008... but hardly any equipment was ready back then. Now a lot of the network stack is ready, so now is when the fee costs should be very low.

I would think those numbers are incredibly cheap for an ISP It's less than the cost of a single ethernet switch and shouldn't be noticeable to any organization that speaks BGP.

tech010101x wrote:

Further, the cost of IPv4 blocks should be higher. Especially the larger blocks... triple or quadruple the cost of IPv4 blocks and divide the cost of IPv6 blocks by 10, and have it set that way for at least 4 years.

I'm not sure that makes sense, the last remaining IPv4 space has been delegated from IANA to the RIRs and there is no way that it'll be relevant in 4 years. It looks like ARIN allocates about 25 Million IPv4 addresses per year and that they have about 50 Million addresses left and that's it. My guess is that allocations will slow down as ISPs are moving on from IPv4, there is no room for customer growth

I find it a little ironic that they're meeting in a city/country where no major ISPs seem to even be taking IPv6 seriously

Same thing I thought when I read it. I hope TELUS and Shaw were banned from the meeting for having a bad attitude. Canada used to be a world leader in communications. But when they changed the Bell government monopolies into private monopolies we fell off the cliff. We now just pay more for less. The rest of the world will be on IPv48 before we light up IPv6.

They should create a free market for IPv4 adresses. Everytime you need a new one you have to buy it from someone else. Your local Telco would do it for the consumer and Big Corp could get some new money by selling their huge stockpiles . With this in place we could keep IPv4 alive for a couple more years and it could get some people moving to IPv6...

Same thing I thought when I read it. I hope TELUS and Shaw were banned from the meeting for having a bad attitude.

You'll be saddened to learn that TELUS was actually the connectivity sponsor for the event ( http://www.ietf.org/meeting/84/index.html ). It seems they were able to provide native IPv6 for the event though, so at least part of their infrastructure seems ready. I've heard that you can peer or transit with them (and Shaw) on IPv6 as well, but obviously they're nowhere to be seen in the consumer space. Both Telus and Shaw seem to be running pretty modern networks though, so I don't really know why they're so silent, and it's annoying.

Given all their other warts though, I expect the situation with Rogers and Bell back east is much worse...

Lee Howard, director of network technology for Time Warner Cable, explained that the World IPv6 Launch goal of one percent IPv6-enabled users was more ambitious than it seems. In Time Warner's network, about half of the cable modems and 30 percent of the Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) in the network support IPv6. About half of the users have an operating system that supports IPv6—nearly 50 percent are still on Windows XP. But 85 percent of customers have a home router between their cable modem and their computer(s), which typically doesn't support IPv6. So the total number of Time Warner users that can actually use IPv6 is only 0.5 x 0.3 x 0.5 x 0.15 = just over one percent.

Of note here is that the IPv6 capable modem I have is because of BYOD, not anything TWC has done, or could do. As for the router that's a pretty easy problem. Most new routers either come with it (although Asus's implementation had issues*) or can be flashed with 3rd party firmware that gives it the capability. The main problem I've noticed is poor documentation in getting it working with tunnels.

*For some reason Comcast's implementation of IPv6 has had major issues with the Asus.

My Canadian ISP ( Rogers) now supports 6to4 tunnels and 6RD for those who have a compatible router. They claim that the 6rd will be replaced by native IPV6 in the future. At some point I guess they will reflash their supplied CISCO "gateway" to do IPV6 tunneling before they introduce native V6.

My usual whinge with IP6 is based on economics 101: supply and demand. As a resource becomes scarse its value increases. Therefore, as IPV4 addresses dwindle, it becomes worthwhile selling them, or even redefining a protocol. I've argued before redefining Class E is cheaper than implementing iPV6.

But hey, we'll see. IPv4 is going to be running for a very long time to come.

Because updating/replacing every router/firewall/appliance in the world with a non-backwards-compatible version of IPv4 is so much easier than updating/replacing every router/firewall/appliance in the world with IPv6? And on top of that, it would be only good for about an extra 18 months worth of IP addresses.

Nutshell: Just as expensive and more of a headache because it can't run side-by-side with the old IPv4 standard and only a temporary fix.

But the good news is that IPv6 adoption grew by 150 percent over the last year. If that rate holds up, half the Internet will be on IPv6 in 2018 with the entire Internet a year later.

I think we can safely assume that curves taken from a fixed set will not reach 100%, ever.

When 99% do not have ipv6, the number approximately triples in one year. When 50% do not have ipv6, the number clearly cannot triple anymore, so you suggest it will just grow to 100% that year?

Well, if IPv4 isn't considered part of the Internet and only IPv6 is, I can assure you that 100% will be running IPv6. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens fairly quickly. I imagine the computing power of a basic home router would easily be able to act as a gateway between ipv6 and ipv4 networks (in five years or so) - at least for your basic protocols (and there wouldn't be much need to provide advanced support on an OS from 2001 by then anyway).

They should create a free market for IPv4 adresses. Everytime you need a new one you have to buy it from someone else. Your local Telco would do it for the consumer. With this in place we could keep IPv4 alive for a couple more years and it could get some people moving to IPv6...

What an excellent idea! I'm sure that local Telco would "do" IPv4 for the consumer the same way that they "do" residential access lines and right-of-way for the consumer... I mean, you do own your own residential tail, right? Or if you don't now, you could certainly buy it if you wanted to, or commission some other provider to build you a new one whenever you want, right?

jpcg wrote:

...and Big Corp could get some new money by selling their huge stockpiles .

Another excellent idea! A free market would assure that Big Corp, with its huge stockpiles of idle IPv4, would be positively eager to cut some quick deals to get those addresses out to people who really need them... it would be irrational for them to just sit on a huge inventory of valuable but under-performing assets, right? That's why, for example, in the US where rental prices are skyrocketing and close to a million people are totally homeless, 9m+ housing units are not currently sitting empty because they're either (still) priced out of the market or else are not available at any price. Oh, wait...

I've got an always-on Windows machine at home, and I've attempted in the past to set it up with an IPv6 tunnel shared out to the rest of my LAN - but never managed to get it to work. All the guides I read had bizarre requirements like a static WAN IP address etc.Can anyone link me to a useful guide ?(neither my ISP or Router support IPv6 so it's tunnel-sharing or nothing for me !)

Can anyone comment on this - http://www.cellstream.com/intranet/tips ... ows-7.html ?It looks to me like that method just enables an inbuilt IPv6 tunnel via a Microsoft server - if that works and can be advertised on a local LAN, then there's no need for accounts with tunnel-brokers and client applications etc.

For it to work well, it really should be your gateway device doing the tunneling. Windows has never been a very good router OS, and in this case I don't think it even supports the commonly used protocols at all, nor can it act as an RA or DHCPv6 server.

If you've got a router that can run dd-wrt/OpenWRT, that could be a route (or you could buy one, they're cheap these days). Or a spare PC running pfSense 2.1-BETA would do the job also.

Teredo can work, but you'll need to enable it on all your client machines, it doesn't make your machine become a router. It's very ad-hoc, but if it works for you it should get you online. The actual tunneling has never been done by MS. I think Hurricane is one of the larger operators these days (they also operate tunnelbroker.net for more managed tunnels).

Got it, thanks error404.So given that most of the world uses Windows, and most home Routers in-use don't support IPv6, the transition isn't trivial for most people ! I was hoping an always-on Windows machine would overcome the Router part of the problem for me

Perhaps mobile devices will be the attack vector by which ipv6 finally breaks through into widespread use. They have fewer legacy issues and are being revised at an insanely quick rate. The switchover would be completely invisible to users but it would result in a significant amount of ipv6 traffic and encourage everything on the net to fully support ipv6.